December, 2008 Monthly Article: Helping Children (and sometimes adults, too) with Transitions
Changes in anyone’s life cause disruptions and stress, and children are no different from adults in this respect. Children, depending on their age, often have not learned to comfort themselves with words. Their experience of transitions can be one of unpredictability, uncertainty and loss of control. Since young children do not express their feelings in words, they might express themselves through actions, appearing —defiant, apathetic or oblivious. Parents may notice this when someone in the family dies, and the child doesn’t seem to be grieving. In fact, they may be grieving, just not on the same schedule or in the same manner as adults do.
It is important to remember that change can also be positive. Some parents, when they must move their families, do so in the in the middle of the school year rather than over the summer. They sense that when school starts in the fall their child might be ignored, since old friends will be excited over seeing each other. However, when a newcomer is introduced in the middle of the year, those same school children may be much more interested in competing for the attention of a new friend. Another was of easing a geographic transition is when one parent goes ahead of the family to a new location. They can send pictures of a new house and/or new school, maybe even new teachers and neighbors. Then all those things can look familiar when the rest of the family follows.
For anyone who is making a permanent transition in their life, memories and routines can help ease the change. Pictures and mementos help us retain precious memories. Some children moving from foster care to an adoptive home will bring picture books of their lives, complete with writings and drawings of former homes and caretakers. Many people will insist that in a fire the thing they would want to save is a photo album or box of keepsakes. Routine is another way of helping ease transitions. For children we can strive to keep bedtime routines, responsibilities for chores, a time to do homework, or regular mealtimes as consistent as possible. These little things are the “glue” that holds our daily lives together. For adults, losing grasp on these routines can lead to depression; for children misbehavior is highly correlated with the loss of those routines.
Finally, special times of year provide an opportunity to create new rituals following permanent changes; we might invite our new neighbors over on Christmas Eve or create a special holiday menu, find a new place to worship or visit different haunted houses on Halloween. If someone in the family has died, there may be gaps to fill requiring special, new rituals in coming years. One family, in which the mother had died, celebrated her birthday by releasing a balloon into the sky, likening it to birthday cards sent to remind her that they were thinking of her. Often, children may need a longer period of time to fully assimilate changes. For everyone involved, there will be a first Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, summer vacation, and so on, until we have explored what this change means in the cycle of our year. Moreover, for children, this change requires patience, remembering and exploration.
Whatever the changes that have occurred in your life, clinicians at Centus are available to help you work through them and to help create something new and enlivening for your life’s cycle.
